**2.1 Fighting environmental challenges**

Today, cities consume more than two-thirds of the world's energy and are responsible for 70% of global CO2 emissions. Recently, UA is considered to deal with the difficult situations like climate change as it plays sufficiently in greening the metros and improving the warmer city climate while encouraging the reuse of organic wastes that reduces the urban energy footprint [2].

The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) suggested that more urban farming should take place as a response to climate change and as a way to build more resilient cities.

UA helps cities to improve the urban environment and become more resilient by [2, 6]:


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*Implication of Urban Agriculture and Vertical Farming for Future Sustainability*

UA contributes to enhance urban food security and nourishment of the poor class. Families that are involved in UA are exposed to better quality and variety of diet. They consume more herbs and greens than the others. Production of food by urban families can supply up to 20–60% of their total food consumption especially in green vegetables, medicinal and aromatic plants, eggs, and milk and meat from small animals. Involvement in UA may also cause better mitigation of diseases as it has better nutritional and medicinal properties in homegrown medicinal plants, it causes more physical exercise, and people do not have to depend on gifts and food aid which may enhance their self-esteem. UA also increases the accessibility of fresh and affordable food for other urban consumers, as most of the food produced by urban farmers is bartered or sold locally. UA also ensures food requirement during natural calamities and wars. In Sierra Leone, the residents devoted themselves in UA in order to meet their daily foods during the civil war that lasted for about 10 years. UA acts as a survival strategy for the refugees and helps them to live in a

The world's urban population is expected to reach 6–9 billion by 2050. It is estimated that poverty will progress from villages to the metro cities by 2030 as 60% of the Earth's population will reside in the cities. Moreover, in most developing countries, urbanization has led to the growth of slum population which has almost doubled in the past 15 years [3]. Also this rapid urbanization in developing countries created difficulty in making sufficient employment opportunities creating very poor living conditions in the slum areas. The presence of UA can definitely meet the requirement of employment to some extent in the cities of developing countries. The effects of UA on poverty alleviation vary with the type of participants involved, the products produced, and the degree of market orientation, among other things. UA often plays an important role in the survival strategies of the urban dwellers, who might be benefited from UA in various ways: Firstly, when a household produces edible crops, their food expenses are reduced and they can do a huge amount of savings. Moreover, the surplus produce can be sold by them in order to make a profitable business [2, 6].

In addition to climate change and urbanization, food production is confronted

Consequently, researchers and practitioners are aiming to separate arable land from production and produce food on a larger scale in and on buildings in high-density urban areas. Scientists visualized the "edible city" and introduced the concept of continuous productive urban landscape (CPUL), recommending the coherent introduction of interlinked productive landscapes into cities as an essential element of sustainable urban infrastructure. One major challenge of urban food production is land availability and access. Principally, there might be large resources of land that could be made accessible for agricultural purposes, but for densely built-up areas and where availability of space often limits the area of production unit, no-space or low-space technologies provide opportunities for space-confined growing [5, 10, 11]. Besides its so many advantages, there are some *disadvantages* of UA associated

with decrease in productive agricultural land. Large-scale urban food production could provide opportunities and take the pressure off agricultural land.

*DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.91133*

state of being worthy for honor [1, 2, 6].

**2.3 Poverty alleviation**

**2.4 Proper land use**

with potential health risks [2]:

**2.2 Food security and nutrition**
